Allen Barrow's friends are polite, shy men like himself who gather to eat in affordable restaurants and recognize each other as refugees from their own families. He is a forgotten clerk in a bank, dresses out of discount stores, and has a small penis that embarrasses him. One night at a bathhouse he meets a man whose presence rivets and intimidates him. Destry Powars--commanding, vulgar, mysterious, spectacularly ugly in his behavior and yet seductive--has suddenly pulled Allen into his orbit and will not let go of him. Destry lives in a closed, monied world that Allen can only dream about; a world that he glimpses only through the smoked plate glass windows of pop media. From generations of  drifters, Powars has been chosen to learn the secret language of money, a language based on force,  deception, and nerve. But who chose him and taught him these "arts"--and what does he really want from Allen? What exactly are the strange Mr. Powars's dark powers? These are the mysteries that Allen will uncover in Warlock, a novel that is both as paralyzing in its suspense as it is voluptuously erotic.

Belhue Press was proud to announce that WARLOCK was the winner of a 2002 IPPY Award from Independent Press Magazine for best Gay and Lesbian Book. This is one of Perry Brass's most compelling stories. It is about compulsive love, surrender, and the total magic of overwhelming needs being met. It is about our sweetest dreams and worst nightmares coming true . . .  and the hard work of warlocks.
 
 

I had no idea it would be like this. Not when we met.

That was different.

It was in New York, at the baths, that flashy, noisy sexual pinball machine on the West Side. I'd just arrived, and, as usual, was all anxious, nervous anxiety. I'm not a great looker (understatement), someone to whom other men are immediately attracted. I am short, slightly built, mid-winter pale. I have a small penis. My "endowment" has always been my Achilles' Heel . . . or hell. Men are for the most part disappointed by it. Itís a small boy's dick. It never grew up and became a real, honest-to-God man's dick. One of those down-on-your-knees, "Yes, sir!", hot 'n' ready, big ol' swingin' acres of cock-flesh you see fully-charged in slick magazines and glistening wet dreams.

I'm aware of that.

 You learn either to live with it, or not. Okay, maybe I can't. I've been in situations like this before: hot, exciting, totally pumped. And men have walked into my room and two minutes later, after inspecting the sad state of my genital packaging, simply walked out.

To make matters worse: I am, perhaps from fear or nerves, or maybe even a cruel trick of heredity . . . prone to impotence. Or, in TV lingo, "erectile dysfunction." I can get "junior" up, nudging him cautiously awake, then with no warning, he stops paying attention. He (okay, it) goes limp. Numb even. Like it's only an extra piece of flesh down there where my stomach ends. I have hated the crap out of my little dick for years. It's like a three-day-old dead minnow.
 So why was I there that night?

I kept wondering that myself--you always do in situations like this. Why was I there: just to embarrass myself? Did I ask for it? Who wouldn't ask that; but who wouldn't hope, either?

What I really wanted was . . . (okay, I admit it) someone to hold me. I mean . . . really hold me, and make me feel like a man does with another man. Warmer; larger; full: that feeling of rising so very far above yourself that you can barely hold on to the earth. Yeah, true, it's like joining something way, way beyond your own paltry limits.

(Or, as the club boys would say, just swinging 'round and 'round on a wonderful piece o' cock.)

 O great hammer, lightning thunder-dick itself: the gonadal, full-lipped god with his star-hot, veiny arm deep, deep inside us.

Strength, throbbing excitement. Lust swimming, pushing its way all the way up to the very brow of power. I wanted that. Waited, like a singer who has forgotten his song, but knows that he must, at the very least, bring himself to sing it. You get out there on the stage, the band's all ready, you open your mouth and . . . I stayed alone in my dark little room, shaking. Like I was pursued by rejection already. Slapped by it. Kicked in the nuts. Savage sex noises exploding around me. Uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh. The grunting. The jackhammer breathing. Ear-splitting sound system. Big naked feet beating the floor as men marched by, peeped in, disappeared. I tried to relax. I wanted to. I needed to force myself to separate from where I was.

I started to drift off . . . the sound system finally began to click down, taking with it the hard breathing, even those feet beating down the industrial carpeting on the floor.

The edges of my brain, so tense, began to ease up and move away from my dumb work at the bank, and my expectations--the truth being that I'd probably leave as untouched as I had walked in. My brain left that; and, for a moment, I felt myself rising into that glorious ether of sex itself. Of celestial abandon; beauty; escape. I was there, back in some tiny innocence before I had learned to be afraid, back where we were all the children of the true Spirit, all-numerous in its Oneness, in that Paradise that accepts each of us exactly for what we are.

I floated, drifting in my head, as the loud, thumping music died off . . . so that I was no longer aware that it's piercing volume had been designed specifically to get anxious, designer-drugged customers in and out of these Halls of Empty Promises as quickly as possible, without ever really touching, except on the most fleeting level. I was relaxed enough so that I was no longer a part of that. I could touch, really: now . . . as I was trailing through a heaven of my own delight, pulsing, alive with my own spirit, imagining myself out there, naked, free, with my equipment no longer a disappointment to anyone; that is, if it were really, at that moment, truly mine.

Who knows? Perhaps we can remake ourselves more than we think. Perhaps you can go through a once-locked door, and then . . . the door, which I'd left slightly ajar, mysteriously opened. With the strong, outside light behind him, I saw almost nothing of him: just that crystalline fine hair, lifted like a glowing field of airborne dandelion puffs on top of the high, silhouetted landscape of his broad, beefy shoulders and his arms. In that sharp, sudden, dazing yellow light from the hallway that he grabbed with him, he strode in. My eyes, forced into immediacy, swallowed him whole.

There was this single, instant glance between us--like a flare fired above a dark ocean--point-blank, intense, disarming; then he dropped the white towel that he wore and snapped the door closed. He dove on to me, his mouth finding mine, his hands kneading my neck. That mouth, the mouth I told you about: I thought it would pull my whole soul from me. I became all goose pimples, shot with this freezing breeze that traveled down to my toes, as his hands followed it, warming me, stroking, caressing and holding me. He licked my shoulders and chest, my tiny erect nipples; my stomach. Then his hands reached for my small organ. Just pulled it gently to him and I found myself completely, unrecognizably . . . yes, hard . . . as nails.

I know thatís totally porn magazine crappo, but how else can I put it? Some ready-to-be-disentangled, captive animal in me had been awakened, and now it responded to him more fully than I had known myself capable of doing: Was I really this? He began to lavish me with his strong tongue, his supple lips, the whole intoxicating seduction of his warm eager mouth, his unannounced being. I was drawn into him as if I were entering the densest forest, that manhood in full leaf that I had waited for without hope on my side or warning on his. "Who," I wondered, "is this?"

His arms pulled me up over him, lifted me, so that he was now under me, supporting me with his strength. I felt as if I were floating in some amniotic sac, attached to this deep, spreading hairiness around me, like the bubble-rich stems that hold the white faces of water lilies to the thick muck below. And I was just drifting among these deep stems; with this thing sucking me, pleasuring me, as babies are given to pleasure, without thought, or boundary, or, even, self.

He stopped. I was trembling. My own "stem" was shot with heat. He started to stroke me. I was big now. I knew it. BIG.

 It was impossible.

 I must have been going crazy; but I knew it: it, I, was big. About as big as I was ever going to get.

I held his head and pushed my fingers through his thick hair, as he clutched them, gratefully, I could tell--but how could such a thing be, that he really wanted to suck tiny me that way? Then I felt this odd, sudden, painful pinch, very instant, like a fine tooth, on my scrotum. It was no more than a pin prick, really--like an alcohol sting on a cut--but it hit my left testicle with the precision of a stereo phono needle on an old black 33-rpm record. Maybe the record was jazz, because after the pain subsided (and it was gone quickly, really fast), it was like Ella Fitzgerald was serenading with Billie Holiday; they were doing it for me. Suddenly I felt so calm that all I could do was stroke his curly head at my crotch. I was at peace. A peace I had only dreamed about before, but which was now floating purely, instinctually, over me.

Warlock, A Novel of Possession, that is as paralyzing in its suspense as it is stirringly erotic.
228 pages, $12.95, ISBN 1-892149-03-6
trade paper.

You can order WARLOCK, A Novel of Posession through Amazon.com

Or though glbt community retailers such as Lambdarising.com.
                                                                                                                                
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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